Following is my reflection on the online space of a blog, specifically Weebly. PLEASE NOTE: I have placed links throughout the post to demonstrate my technical skill in using Weebly. In this course I have used Weebly to create my first ever blog (plus a small site for Reflection 3.3), and I feel I have learnt considerably from this experience. I have had some great fun with this, and also learnt that it is rather easy to make mistakes! I lost one of my reflections (as talked out in my blog under ‘Ramblings’), which caused me to look again at a number of other student’s blogs and compare my format to theirs. Upon reflection of why I lost this work, I re-designed my site to a format that would make it harder to replicate this mistake (details here). All things considered, I like Weebly and love looking at different designs and experimenting with different layouts and formats. As mentioned in my first post (Reflection 1.1), a long time ago I built a website for my local Church using Weebly and was happy with the outcome, but I had never made a blog. I find Weebly intuitive in its design, utilising an easily understood and user-friendly interface. It is so simple that a design can be selected and modified very easily, with additional elements added to the page by dragging and dropping them from the menu bar (see Figure 1). Figure 1 Pages can be easily added, copied, deleted (need to be careful here!), and new sites built very quickly in comparison to the time spent to build a page using code, such as HTML (I have done this in the past also). In short, blogs (and websites), built using Weebly are highly customisable. Regarding privacy settings, I spent some time looking at what is available on Weebly and found that in order to password protect your site or a specific pages an upgrade to a paid plan is required (see Figure 2). Figure 2 So, in order to make a ‘hidden’, page I made a page and selected the checkbox marked “Hide in Navigation” (Figure 3). Therefore the only way to access the page (unless someone guesses the URL or finds a way to display a site map for my site), is for me to supply a link or the URL to those I want to access the page. The page can be found here: http://jeffsblogcqu.weebly.com/hidden.html. Figure 3 In my ‘Reflections’ I experimented with different functions such as; adding photos; linking to websites; commenting on a post to test and make sure commenting worked; and I added a table by saving it as a jpeg and inserting it that way. On my ‘Ramblings’ page I have kept a record of a number of things I encountered, such as how to change the favicon on the free Weebly site, and how to find the cached web pages in Chrome. In hindsight I should have spent less time on things such as changing the favicon – but it did take my interest and I’m happy with the result! I also embeded a video that was used in one of the lectures in my ‘Resources’ page. In relation to Bloom’s Taxonomy, using my blog as an example, those who read it can move from the ‘remember’ stage (simply reading the content on the site), to higher level order thinking in the ‘evaluate’ and ‘create’ stages by interacting with the author (me), by commenting on the blog posts. Extending this to the classroom, the same applies for students creating and collaborating with one another using blogs. Suggestions about how this tool might be used in my teaching context Through this exercise, I believe I am in a better position to teach in the classroom using blogs. Using the questions put forward by Holt (as cited in Brown, 2015), for describing the SAMR model levels in Figure 4, I feel that blogs can be very useful as follows: Figure 4
As can be seen, there is great capacity for collaboration when using blogs. Legal, Safety and Ethical Considerations As is the case with all work on-line, safety is a high priority. I have enabled the function in Weebly to email me when a new comment is added to any post. There is also the ability for comments to require approval, but as my site is used for this course only and I have not entered any ‘Meta key words’, or a ‘Site description’ in the SEO section of the Settings for my site, I did not choose this option. To add another level of security, I could activate the option to ‘Hide site from search engines’, however I do not think this is relevant in the context for which the site is used. Regarding copyright, the Australian Copyright Council provides a useful following fact sheet regarding the basics of in regards to education which can be accessed here. Educational institutions are covered by special provisions in the Copyright Act, but this does not mean copyright does not apply. In the case of images and text, the following is stated by the Australian Copyright Council, 2014: “In each scheme, the amount of a work that can be used is, in most cases, limited to a “reasonable portion” (usually 10% or 1 chapter) if the work is available for purchase. A specific notice must be included with digital copies and communications.” For blogs and other sites (such as the two I have made for this course), the easiest way to ensure copyright is not infringed upon is to reference quotations and other information gleaned from others, and use sites such as 'Photos for class' which provides automatic citation, and Pixabay which provides images free from copyright with no attribution required. For my sites I used Pixabay specifically due to this reason. Regarding safety for children, children’s identity, reputation and cyber-bullying; if used in a classroom, the teacher can monitor all blogs to look for instances of cyber-bullying. Weebly also requires those who register to be over the age of 13 years. Weebly also prohibits certain sites being created on its platform that can be found in Figure 5 below: Figure 5
As a teacher, when using Weebly, in addition to Weebly's terms of service I would stipulate that the following points be adhered to by all students:
REFERENCE LIST Brown, P, 2015. A Guide for Bringing the SAMR Model to iPads. Retrieved from https://www.edsurge.com/news/2015-02-06-a-guide-for-bringing-the-samr-model-to-ipads Australian Copyright Council. (2014). Education: Copyright basics. Retrieved from http://www.copyright.org.au/acc_prod/ACC/Information_Sheets/Education__Copyright_Basics.aspx?WebsiteKey=8a471e74-3f78-4994-9023-316f0ecef4ef Weebly. (2017). Terms of service. Retrieved from https://www.weebly.com/au/terms-of-service
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |